Sorry, I am here, kind of. It has been a terrible week with lots of work, and I was a little bit stressed. But now it’s better. Have you picked up a resource? I was using that really old compendium book that I posted sometime ago in the Coptic thread (ancient and extinct languages), but I don’t know if that’s the most adequate.

vijayjohn wrote:And I learned that there are efforts to revive the Coptic language inside the church, but also that there is an entire political party in Egypt called the Liberal Egyptian Party whose goals include the revival of the Egyptian language and/or Coptic and recognizing Egyptian Arabic (instead of Modern Standard Arabic) as the official language of Egypt.

The revival efforts are, from what I remember reading, based on another dialect of Coptic than what we will be studying. Also, that political party apparently dissolved in 2011 and merged with another party to form a third party. I didn't look into the ideal of the newly-formed party, though.

księżycowy wrote:Ok, how about the Introduction (pages vii-xvii) by either next week (11/25) or the week after (12/2)?

EDIT: I wouldn't mind bi-weekly check-ins, rather than weekly, myself.

I'd prefer to try for bi-weekly as well, especially if we're going to try and do the full Introduction by then. It's been a while since I last did Koine Greek, and though I remember the alphabet for the most part, depending on how different the phonology is with Coptic, the Introduction won't simply be a review. Plus, there is also things like the part about stress, etc.

Antea wrote:I already know the Coptic alphabet, it’s like the Greek but with some more letters more (but usually there are no fonts).

Do you think you could update the first post with each weekly (or biweekly) assignment? You don't have to, but I find it helpful.

I'm having the darnedest time trying to wrap my head around the alphabet for some weird reason.

EDIT: OK, I'm reading the part about the alphabet in the book after having tried to read about it on Wikipedia, and now, it's not so weird anymore. I think I just needed a bit of time to get over some of the Coptic-specific characters (including some of the Greek-derived ones!).

vijayjohn wrote:I'm having the darnedest time trying to wrap my head around the alphabet for some weird reason.

EDIT: OK, I'm reading the part about the alphabet in the book after having tried to read about it on Wikipedia, and now, it's not so weird anymore. I think I just needed a bit of time to get over some of the Coptic-specific characters (including some of the Greek-derived ones!).

So would you recommend I check out about the Coptic alphabet on Wikipedia first, and then try the book?

vijayjohn wrote:I'm having the darnedest time trying to wrap my head around the alphabet for some weird reason.

EDIT: OK, I'm reading the part about the alphabet in the book after having tried to read about it on Wikipedia, and now, it's not so weird anymore. I think I just needed a bit of time to get over some of the Coptic-specific characters (including some of the Greek-derived ones!).

So would you recommend I check out about the Coptic alphabet on Wikipedia first, and then try the book?

You might find it helpful especially if you're kind of frustrated, like I was, about the letters being so fucking small in the book. Wikipedia (this article, in this particular case) has a good habit of presenting each symbol in each script in a nice, large font.